


Being Blue

by trickybonmot



Category: Hellboy (movie-verse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-18
Updated: 2011-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-15 18:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trickybonmot/pseuds/trickybonmot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he sleeps, Abraham Sapien walks the halls of his memory house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Being Blue

Before he sleeps, Abraham Sapien walks the halls of his memory house. He has never lived in a house. He has been in houses, though, usually haunted or otherwise dysfunctional, so forgive him if he does not always have the tropes quite right. The house was Bruttenholm's idea, an ancient technique for arranging all that the fish-man knows, or could know, or must know. (Bruttenholm also gave the house its facetious address, 668.) The house is all made of symbols, and the relations between them, one thing next to another and next to another, so that Abe can follow lines and learn things that he didn't know he knew. But there are real things here as well, beings who dwell on the landscape of Abe's mind.

Inside the front door, for example, is a girl in blue, who flees, yellow eyes, a silken hem flicking past a corner. This is the only house she lives in, now, but her appearance does not hurt him, for Abe is beginning to dream, and feels only a confusion, an urge to bow, a wondering where-can-she-have-got-to. He follows her, losing her, and in this way wanders further in.

Abe's work has its own room, a long steel space behind a glass wall, along which Abe trails his fingers, fishy feet shuffling on the Persian runner in the hall. It is as though the busy, unnamed agents behind the glass are swimming in an aquarium, competently wheeling barrows, checking the locks on the old-testament beasties, hyperboreoids, fairy vermin, were-everything, which are each one locked in a box by a lock whose key is a red stone hand.

Further in, the house is more homely. Liz is in her place, on the hearthrug; the spark of her is tripled in Abe's eyes, a secret there that must be kept from many, if it can be. Liz is aflame, as usual in this house, but majestically, serenely.

Hellboy does not have a place, as Liz does. Rather, he inhabits the whole house, and crops up unexpectedly in Abe's musings. True, he is often in the TV chair, but he may appear, for example, getting milk out of the icebox, wearing a patched dressing-gown that Abe does not remember, or coupling with Liz on the parlor's leather sofa--that last a memory only of a thought, but one that can hardly be avoided, seeing them together, he big and red and she on fire. Hellboy seems to have a room here, a wardrobe; he comes and goes, not at all like the Hellboy of the BPRD, imprisoned.

Dr. Bruttenholm is another resident, though rarer now to glimpse, and usually in the library. What a pile of oddities surround him there, holy and broken: silver bullets, manticore's bones, fragments of medieval icons and pre-colombian mosaic. In the library, music plays, and poetry echoes. White smoke rises from a blue volume of Tennyson. Each book is filled with pictures and voices, the major catalogue of Abe's years among men is here. But even this is not the heart of Abe's house; there is a deeper and a different heart.

Sometimes in the basement Abe finds it, shadowy and green-brown. Other times at the top of the house, lit by skylights, blue and sparkling. Those places are joined and can be reached always by a narrow stair of wood that ends in what else but a diving board.

The heart of Abe's house is a watery place, the ocean of his deep past, pre-lingual, without nights or days. The rooms of the ocean have no walls or windows, no furnishings or fixtures, and no voices. Abe is sleeping now, and sleeping, swims.


End file.
